Well, that didn't take long: Elon Musk already censors a Twitter post — from himself

It only took Elon Musk 36 hours to go soft.

The “I Did It My Way (With a Lot of  Government Subsidies)” billionaire retreated over the weekend faster than Monty Python’s knights in the face of the killer rabbit, after retweeting a Twitter post suggesting that the political attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband was faked.

Hey, it could have happened. I’ve known lots of 82-year-old men who would hit themselves upside the head with a hammer to prove a point.

Specifically, Musk retweeted an opinion that Paul Pelosi was injured in a dispute with a male prostitute, not some right-wing sicko.

Let’s establish first that as right-wing conspiracy theories go, this one isn’t even all that deranged. It’s not even close to Jewish space lasers shooting out voting machines, or a group of parents faking their own children’s deaths in order to ban semi-automatic weapons.

But no matter, Musk deleted his own retweet hours after putting it up. So after blasting Twitter for years for its perceived censorship and pledging to permit controversial opinions no matter how disgusting, it wasn’t two days before Musk censored someone, and the person that he censored was himself.

Isn’t that, er, rich. Money can’t buy you snottiness.

Already, Musk had backed away from his promise to reinstate banned Twitter impresario Donald Trump, saying that decision will not be made by him, but with an as-yet unappointed “Moderation Council.”

Isn’t that what Truman said? The buck stops with the moderation council. Moderation councils are the social media equivalent of “Ask your mother.” They’re for people who are too weak to take the heat on their own. I know, because that’s exactly what I would do. Matter of fact, I may appoint a Moderation Council to review my columns before they’re published. Don’t like what I write? Don’t blame me, blame the Moderation Council. Who sits on the Moderation Council? Um, that’s confidential.

Still, wasn’t this just entirely predictable? This is what winning does to you. It’s so much fun sitting on the outside throwing bombs, but when you become the one in charge, everyone’s throwing them at you. I mean, look at the Los Angeles Rams. They win the Super Bowl one year, and the next they’re 3-5.

Of course this truth does nothing to comfort the left, which remains horrified.

“Musk owning Twitter is like putting the fox in charge of the henhouse when it comes to political misinformation,” Joan Donovan, a Harvard researcher told The Washington Post. “When he was just a user, that did not matter as much as it does now because people may come to distrust the platform if they don’t trust the owner’s core values.”

What? Distrust Twitter? How you talk. Next you’ll be telling me that people sell shoddy merchandise on Facebook.

Look, this is Twitter. Not the Encyclopedia Britannica. Twitter. If people are visiting Twitter for all their intellectual needs, the battle is already lost.

Not that it isn’t amusing. I have great fun playing Twitter Roulette, muting one person at random every day. Right now I’m down to following three people, two of whom are dead.

That’s why I’m maybe a little sad at seeing bad boy Elon Musk wilt like an orchid in an ice cave. You would like to think he’d be above it, just as you would like to think Jesus didn’t have to brush his teeth.

But the world has realities, and by “realities” I mean “advertisers.” As long as they’re signing the checks, he has to say “yes sir” and “no sir” just like everyone else. (Elon Musk, not Jesus.)

So he falls back on the same thing all American executives fall back on: Laying off half the staff. Like I’ve said before, you see one billionaire, you've seen them all.

Tim Rowland is a Herald-Mail columnist.

This article originally appeared on The Herald-Mail: Delete of retweet to Pelosi conspiracy theory link to be expected